AMD’s stock price plummets amidst CFO resignation

Thomas Seifert suddenly, mysteriously steps down after a three-year tenure.

Just weeks after AMD revealed its plans for its next CPU refresh, Steamroller, the company has taken a significant financial hit. It comes on Monday, in the aftermath of the imminent departure of AMD's chief financial officer, Thomas Seifert.

“Seifert’s departure is not based on any disagreement over the company’s accounting principles or practices, or financial statement disclosures,” AMD said in the statement.

Seifert will leave the company on September 28 after three years of service. He had been viewed as a bulwark against the company’s many struggles in recent years.

AMD has about 20 percent of the processor market overall, which has been bolstered by its 2006 acquisition of ATI Technologies. The company has been focusing its corporate strategy in recent years on adapting ATI’s GPU background to its own CPU architecture.

"Thomas leaving is a big deal. He was pretty well-liked by investors. He was viewed as he rock throughout all the changes," Evercore Partners analyst Patrick Wang told Reuters.

As a result, AMD’s stock has taken a hit, falling by as much as 12 percent in after-hour trading.

47 Reader Comments

Maybe this is slightly off topic, but has anyone else noticed the strange trading in AMD in the last four days? If you look at the intraday chart for the last five days, you'll notice suspiciously flat trading Wednesday and Thursday at $3.90, and this afternoon at $4.00. Was someone buying a lot of stock to keep the price pinned at $3.90 last week, or is that just normal stock behavior?

This is anecdotal evidence just how disruptive the stock market is. The stock market doesn't help the economy. It doesn't help the long-term prospects of corporations. Primarily what it does is help One Percenters and their friends cash out at the expense of the corporations and the people who are actually invested in it, which stockholders are not.

I had to watch the IPO of a small corporation that once employed me destroy it from the outside in a very short span of time. I never want to watch that firsthand again.

This is anecdotal evidence just how disruptive the stock market is. The stock market doesn't help the economy. It doesn't help the long-term prospects of corporations. Primarily what it does is help One Percenters and their friends cash out at the expense of the corporations and the people who are actually invested in it, which stockholders are not.

You do realize that no company is require to go public, right? They do so knowing the risk and also knowing the rewards (e.g.: Apple's stock price, Google's stock price, hell Amazon's stock price with a crazy 300 P/E ratio).

You do also realize that a whole lot more than the so-called "One Percenters" invest in the stock market, right?

If the CFO leaves a company (especially after a relatively short period), it could mean that there's something that he/she knows that you don't, and if you can't live with that uncertaintly you dump the stock as not to lose any (or much money). Some will see it as an opportunity (if they still believe in AMD), and they'll buy the stock at a discounted price.

That's the game (and it really is a matter of game theory), but you only play it voluntarily.

AMD used to be the only thing that kept Intel from having absolute control in the processor market. Without AMD Intel might have been broken up or at least faced very close governmental scrutiny. Now with the traditional PC market shrinking we have ARM, Samsung, nVidia, etc dominating the mobile market so hopefully it won't become an issue. That said if Intel tried to buy AMD it would certainly get shot down by all sorts of government bodies.

AMD used to be the only thing that kept Intel from having absolute control in the processor market. Without AMD Intel might have been broken up or at least faced very close governmental scrutiny. Now with the traditional PC market shrinking we have ARM, Samsung, nVidia, etc dominating the mobile market so hopefully it won't become an issue. That said if Intel tried to buy AMD it would certainly get shot down by all sorts of government bodies.

Intel has no monopoly. It never has actually been close to one.

Now, why is that? First define the market; 32 bit processors, cool. ARM has smoked Intel forever. They have always had a larger market share, just a market share where ARM makes under a dime for each processor. Same for 64 bit processors, there are lots of processors in the market. From a technical standpoint the definition of desktop (a declining market) doesn't actually move to a monopoly.

Okay, why does Intel make so much more money? Well, the customers will pay what Intel charges. It is like the iPhone in a certain regard. Android is where all the growth is in the smart phone market but a huge percentage of the profit is made by Apple.

Do I buy Intel over AMD? Not always. AMD has some interesting products over the years and I will buy them when their products and my interest or convenience overlap. Intel has the current performance crown and I tend to wait a few years between purchases so we will see what my next one is (I know, you don't care) but currently AMD doesn't have anything worth looking at even though they are half the money.

I want AMD to continue. As to keeping "honest" I think the word I would use is instead competitive. Without AMD handing them their corporate butts we wouldn't be enjoying the Tick/Tock solutions from Intel. Before x86-64 was out Intel wanted iTitanic to be our only 64 bit option. As if.

I fear for AMD however. Without their own fabs it might just be a matter of time. And considering what the ARM market is actually aimed at (low cost, low watt) I really am not looking forward to Intel having those cute little nearly useless, for most of my work, processors as their major competitor.

This is anecdotal evidence just how disruptive the stock market is. The stock market doesn't help the economy. It doesn't help the long-term prospects of corporations. Primarily what it does is help One Percenters and their friends cash out at the expense of the corporations and the people who are actually invested in it, which stockholders are not.

You do realize that no company is require to go public, right?

Only as long as they manage to bootstrap themselves into profitability without picking up any venture capital in the process.

If AMD doesn't get their game up to par with their rival I don't see their stock going north anytime soon. I prefer AMD over Intel as a brand, but I am shooting myself in the foot if I buy one of their chips these days.

I like where they are going with the APU though. PC gaming may owe a resurgence at least in part to the fact the average low end pc with an APU chip can now play ports of any console games. However, if they aren't competitive with future architectures expect intel to dominate in this department soon as well.

As for Bulldozer, who releases a next-gen chip that performs worse than the last gen?

You do realize that no company is require to go public, right? They do so knowing the risk and also knowing the rewards (e.g.: Apple's stock price, Google's stock price, hell Amazon's stock price with a crazy 300 P/E ratio).

If AMD doesn't get their game up to par with their rival I don't see their stock going north anytime soon. I prefer AMD over Intel as a brand, but I am shooting myself in the foot if I buy one of their chips these days.

I like where they are going with the APU though. PC gaming may owe a resurgence at least in part to the fact the average low end pc with an APU chip can now play ports of any console games. However, if they aren't competitive with future architectures expect intel to dominate in this department soon as well.

As for Bulldozer, who releases a next-gen chip that performs worse than the last gen?

Intel? Going by (likely faulty) memory here, but Intel pulled a similar thing after 586/Pentium while AMD did a incremental improvement with their K7/Athlon. End result was that AMD significantly gained on Intel in terms of price/performance. Now the roles have swapped. Intel does more of a evolution, while AMD tries to revolutionize with the idea that the GPU will be the FPU of the future.

Yeah, AMD's been up to some interesting stuff in the last few years. I hope that we get the chance to see the finished results of their gpu/cpu fusion project in a couple of generations once they get the kinks worked out and can start being competitive again with Intel. After all, we only have a couple of 'tick's' left in Intel's cycle before Skymont, which appears to be the end of the line for Intel unless they can crack the 10nm barrier. If AMD can hold one for that long, I feel that a lot of their work and research in APU research could really pay off... sadly, I'm not sure they'll be able to make it to the finish line before running out of money/marketshare.

Here's hoping someone picks up their patent portfolio and runs with it should the worst occur.

Correction: It looks like Intel has some kind of plan in place beyond 10nm, but we have no idea what to expect at that point, but I guess we'll see in two or three years

As for Bulldozer, who releases a next-gen chip that performs worse than the last gen?

Intel? Going by (likely faulty) memory here, but Intel pulled a similar thing after 586/Pentium while AMD did a incremental improvement with their K7/Athlon. End result was that AMD significantly gained on Intel in terms of price/performance. Now the roles have swapped. Intel does more of a evolution, while AMD tries to revolutionize with the idea that the GPU will be the FPU of the future.

Facebook's IPO was driven by the "500 shareholder rule", as was Microsoft's apparently. Venture capital won't force a company public (the investors can follow whatever exit strategy they like) but too many stockholders can.

A couple of years ago, I would agree. With how Intel is trying to gain a foothold in the mobile processing market, I think they are going to continue trying hard to innovate even after they finish off AMD.

Facebook's IPO was driven by the "500 shareholder rule", as was Microsoft's apparently. Venture capital won't force a company public (the investors can follow whatever exit strategy they like) but too many stockholders can.

Well venture capital becomes stockholders, no? So once they are in the door they drag others of their kind in the door and before you know it the company lawyer brings up the 500 rule and your off to a IPO.

Maybe we're a bit quick to put AMD into the ground. For the majority of desktop users and a fair number of notebook users with low mobility needs, price matters more than having the very best in performance. This is where AMD used to thrive. Piledriver, with more IPCs than bulldozer and other architectural tweaks might bring back the like of the phenom II.

For AMD to survive though, it will be key to make some highly energy efficient chips for laptops. I don't buy that laptops are going away anytime soon. Time will tell if AMD can catch up on the energy/performance front...

This is anecdotal evidence just how disruptive the stock market is. The stock market doesn't help the economy. It doesn't help the long-term prospects of corporations. Primarily what it does is help One Percenters and their friends cash out at the expense of the corporations and the people who are actually invested in it, which stockholders are not.

You do realize that no company is require to go public, right? They do so knowing the risk and also knowing the rewards (e.g.: Apple's stock price, Google's stock price, hell Amazon's stock price with a crazy 300 P/E ratio).

You do also realize that a whole lot more than the so-called "One Percenters" invest in the stock market, right?

If the CFO leaves a company (especially after a relatively short period), it could mean that there's something that he/she knows that you don't, and if you can't live with that uncertaintly you dump the stock as not to lose any (or much money). Some will see it as an opportunity (if they still believe in AMD), and they'll buy the stock at a discounted price.

That's the game (and it really is a matter of game theory), but you only play it voluntarily.

Harsh thing to say when it sounds like the guy lost his job after a failed IPO.

It's true that stockholders really don't care about the company as much as they do making money and the Stock Market is flawed both financially and ethically. Still, saying that the stock market doesn't help the economy isn't exactly true either. Huge corporations may not be pretty but they do tend to employ a lot of people. Besides, even before stuff like stocks and bonds existed, you always had the poor and "1%" thing going on.

Also, as someone with a science background, I feel the need to point out that no major decision should be made on anecdotal evidence.

This is anecdotal evidence just how disruptive the stock market is. The stock market doesn't help the economy. It doesn't help the long-term prospects of corporations. Primarily what it does is help One Percenters and their friends cash out at the expense of the corporations and the people who are actually invested in it, which stockholders are not.

You do realize that no company is require to go public, right? They do so knowing the risk and also knowing the rewards (e.g.: Apple's stock price, Google's stock price, hell Amazon's stock price with a crazy 300 P/E ratio).

You do also realize that a whole lot more than the so-called "One Percenters" invest in the stock market, right?

If the CFO leaves a company (especially after a relatively short period), it could mean that there's something that he/she knows that you don't, and if you can't live with that uncertaintly you dump the stock as not to lose any (or much money). Some will see it as an opportunity (if they still believe in AMD), and they'll buy the stock at a discounted price.

That's the game (and it really is a matter of game theory), but you only play it voluntarily.

Doesn't change the fact that Wall Street is greed based driven short term and fuck the world approach. Does it.

I hate to say this, but I saw this coming 21 months ago... AMD is getting squeezed between ARM and Intel, and there's very little market left between their combined entrenched positions (which are expanding towards the middle, squeezing AMD even more).http://www.slyman.org/blog/2011/02/arm- ... hitecture/I said 21 months ago, that anyone with money should invest in ARM and go short on AMD! It's nice to have my analytical approach validated, even if I didn't have any money to invest, and so didn't make anything from this.I'm now going to supplement my investment advice... Anyone with money should buy Intel shares before they rise off the back of AMD's woes... With AMD losing the power to influence the market, Intel profits are going to rise significantly in the short to medium term, and Intel is going to need investment to absorb more of the desktop & server market.

Intel I guess. The P4 sucked, and had to use RD-RAM to not look worse than a P3.

It's my understanding that the P4 was oriented around 5Ghz+ speeds; it was completely, absolutely designed around clockspeed, clockspeed, clockspeed. At lower clocks, it wasn't very efficient, but Intel expected to be able to ramp it so fast that it wouldn't matter.

Of course, they ran into a brick wall at 3Ghz, and suddenly their inefficient-at-low-clocks design was the millstone around their necks. Combine that with the deeply unpopular move to RDRAM, and AMD did very well. Intel thought they'd be at 10GHz within a few years, and they would have stomped everyone with the P4 design, but that turned out to be much more difficult than anyone had realized. Here it is, ten years later, and we're only just nudging 5GHz with a few processors, hardly anything that normal consumers would ever buy.

So Intel shifted gears, and took IP developed by their Israeli subsidiary, the Centrino, which was a detuned P3 -- they carefully went through the P3 and removed transistors (and, thus, heat and power consumption) from stages that ran too much faster than the slowest part of the pipeline. And they developed on that foundation in ways that have never really been made public, called that Core, and then Core 2, and now the i-series.

As far as I know, the true bottleneck in current PCs is RAM speed. The basic speed of RAM has barely moved in the last ten years, even as it's gotten enormously denser and hotter. It just isn't getting faster, so they keep coming up with ways to group more chips in parallel, to increase bandwidth -- but latency isn't that much different now than it was ten years ago. And this is the single biggest thing holding back single-threaded CPU performance. It was slow RAM that crippled the P4, because of its long pipeline, and it's still slow RAM that's holding everything back, a decade later.

If AMD doesn't get their game up to par with their rival I don't see their stock going north anytime soon. I prefer AMD over Intel as a brand, but I am shooting myself in the foot if I buy one of their chips these days. ........

AMD still offers a tremendous value play. They are great for corporate workstations where the user isn't constantly compiling, compressing video or spending the whole day in Photoshop. They are also great for home PCs for casual gaming and everything else. The overwhelming majority of users don't need something bleeding edge. My office workstation, on which I am typing, is an A8-3870, and with an SSD (the single most important item for perceived performance) I am happier than a pig in shit, and that is coming from someone very picky about performance (the kind of guy who overclocks his smartphone). With the APU, UI performance is great and the mobo drives two monitors.

This is anecdotal evidence just how disruptive the stock market is. The stock market doesn't help the economy. It doesn't help the long-term prospects of corporations. Primarily what it does is help One Percenters and their friends cash out at the expense of the corporations and the people who are actually invested in it, which stockholders are not.

You do realize that no company is require to go public, right? They do so knowing the risk and also knowing the rewards (e.g.: Apple's stock price, Google's stock price, hell Amazon's stock price with a crazy 300 P/E ratio).

You do also realize that a whole lot more than the so-called "One Percenters" invest in the stock market, right?

If the CFO leaves a company (especially after a relatively short period), it could mean that there's something that he/she knows that you don't, and if you can't live with that uncertaintly you dump the stock as not to lose any (or much money). Some will see it as an opportunity (if they still believe in AMD), and they'll buy the stock at a discounted price.

That's the game (and it really is a matter of game theory), but you only play it voluntarily.

Doesn't change the fact that Wall Street is greed based driven short term and fuck the world approach. Does it.

Would you care to suggest a better way for individuals to voluntarily participate in private investment? I'm a 40 percenter and the stock markets have treated me quite well, and financial literacy is really not that difficult.

The stock exchanges provide regulation, aggregate data, help with risk assessment and allow someone like me to actually get some skin in the financial world. Perhaps the markets could be regulated better to prevent abuse, but fact-free grousing doesn't do anyone any favors.

This is anecdotal evidence just how disruptive the stock market is. The stock market doesn't help the economy. It doesn't help the long-term prospects of corporations. Primarily what it does is help One Percenters and their friends cash out at the expense of the corporations and the people who are actually invested in it, which stockholders are not.

I had to watch the IPO of a small corporation that once employed me destroy it from the outside in a very short span of time. I never want to watch that firsthand again.

You have zero understanding of what a stock market is for.

The purpose of a stock market is to enable industries with massive fixed capital costs, particularly startup costs, without resorting to gigantic government initiatives. For example, I want to supply the US with automobiles. To do this, I have to have plants that stamp the body, plants that mill the engine parts, assembly plants, and so forth. This is typically much more than a single investor or a group of private investors can finance. Stock markets allow pooling of funds. Think of it as crowdsourcing money.

True, we can go the Soviet direction and have five year plans to build crappy cars, but the stock market, for all of its warts (and there are many), is the best way of enabling these types of industries.

That being said, most software companies have relatively negligible startup costs and don't need to go public. They go public because of greed and/or they have to as was pointed out earlier.

You do realize that no company is require to go public, right? They do so knowing the risk and also knowing the rewards (e.g.: Apple's stock price, Google's stock price, hell Amazon's stock price with a crazy 300 P/E ratio).

Well, there are forced IPOs (e.g. Facebook).

Facebook wasn't forced into an IPO.

Facebook IPO was a failure in many ways, the only people that made money, are the people who already had stock from before the IPO and sold it on the opening day.

One could say that Facebook's stock is still overpriced based on its performance of yet.

As other people have noted we have had for the last 10 years the same clockspeed. The most worthy improvement is improving what the CPU can do in each tick of its clock.

Intel has been able to improve on this a great deal with its Core, Core 2, i5, i3, and i7 product lines over the years. While AMD has been able to keep up with Intel for the most part, some of their newer designs have some flaws with single threaded performance, it appears they are going for the spread the work across many cores.

You do realize that no company is require to go public, right? They do so knowing the risk and also knowing the rewards (e.g.: Apple's stock price, Google's stock price, hell Amazon's stock price with a crazy 300 P/E ratio).

Well, there are forced IPOs (e.g. Facebook).

Facebook wasn't forced into an IPO.

Facebook IPO was a failure in many ways, the only people that made money, are the people who already had stock from before the IPO and sold it on the opening day.

One could say that Facebook's stock is still overpriced based on its performance of yet.

As other people have noted we have had for the last 10 years the same clockspeed. The most worthy improvement is improving what the CPU can do in each tick of its clock.

Intel has been able to improve on this a great deal with its Core, Core 2, i5, i3, and i7 product lines over the years. While AMD has been able to keep up with Intel for the most part, some of their newer designs have some flaws with single threaded performance, it appears they are going for the spread the work across many cores.

They also aren't going to be able to keep up with the size reductions unless they figure out a way that doesn't trample on Intel's 3-D tri-gate patents.